Speaking to PetaPixel last week at the CP+ show in Japan, Fujifilm says it is aware of the demands for an X-Pro series successor but wants to make sure that what it produces isn’t just a small, “boring” upgrade.
It has been almost six years since the Fujifilm X-Pro3 was announced and many fans of the system have been wondering for some time when the next iteration of the popular rangefinder-style camera will be released. It has been so long that some believe Fujifilm has abandoned the line, but the company says that’s not true — the company promises a new X-Pro will come at some point.
“We haven’t abandoned the line so it will come one day, but we need something which would satisfy the expert users,” “We haven’t abandoned the line so it will come one day, but we need something which would satisfy the expert users,” Yuji Igarashi, General Manager of Professional Imaging Group, Imaging Solutions Division, Fujifilm Corporation, tells PetaPixel.
“Of course, we can put the X-Processor 5 and the new X-Trans sensor in an X-Pro3 and call it X-Pro4, but that’s boring,” Igarashi says.
For the last couple of years, Fujifilm has said that it wants to give X-Pro users an updated camera that contains aspects that are worth having, not just a rehash of an existing product — in short, a product that exists simply to exist as a successor. Fujifilm instead wants to make something worthy of an upgrade. A good example of this is how it iterated on the X100 series with last year’s X100VI — the higher resolution sensor and the addition of the in-body image stabilization made for a markedly improved camera that gives photographers noticeable changes to how they take images.
Unfortunately, Fujifilm admits that in its efforts to give the X-Pro series this same glow-up, it has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that might be. Through that time, expectations of what would be an X-Pro4 continue to expand, making it even harder for Fujifilm to live up to those expectations. It’s a difficult problem: the longer it takes to develop it, the more difficult it will be to please fans of the series.
“We probably made it difficult for ourselves,” Igarashi admits. “Because we perhaps made the X-Pro too special.”
Image credits: Fujifilm
Source link
